Date of USPS Rate Hike Looms for Online Merchants

Online sellers are dealing with increases in shipping costs this year, with the impending January 17th rate hike from the US Postal Service especially worrisome as they contain some big percentage increases across some classes of shipping services.

Just some of the changes we noted in our early coverage included the following:

Priority Mail will see an almost 10% average rate increase.

Prices for Parcel Select Lightweight will increase by 23.5 percent.

First Class Package International Service rates will see an overall increase of 21.6%.

Click-N-Ship will offer only retail prices and will no longer offer Commercial Base discounted pricing.

Commercial Plus discounts are decreasing and will eventually be eliminated.

You can download a spreadsheet containing detailed rates from the USPS website(look in the left margin), but it’s not user friendly and is sure to baffle people who aren’t familiar with Excel.

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Stamps put together a guide to the changes in October, and Shipping Easy published a guide on how to prepare for the changes released this week. ShipRush offered advice on how sellers could compare rates across carriers by using tools like its own.